Financial inclusion - access to financial services - is increasing worldwide, often with official support. This special feature discusses the implications for central banks. Greater financial inclusion changes the behaviour of firms and consumers in ways that could influence the effectiveness of...

Economic history can offer an independent contribution to the analysis of the conditions of success and the mode of action of different types of monetary integration. Up to now, the debate about the functional mechanisms of monetary unions in the real world has ignored the Habsburg Monarchy. The...

The challenge of financial inclusion is among the most intractable policy problems in banking. Despite being the world’s wealthiest economy, many Americans are shut out of the financial system. Five percent of households lack a bank account, and an additional thirteen percent rely on expensive...

In our article we review the secular stagnation hypothesis, firstly postulated by Hansen (1939), to describe the current macroeconomic dynamics faced by developed economies. Based in the existing literature, we elaborate on a workable definition of secular stagnation founded on four pillars:...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...